The photographs in i saw the air fly were made by children in southeastern Turkey, a few kilometres from the Syrian border, many of them refugees from Syria and Iraq. They come out of Sirkhane, a mobile darkroom that moves from village to village and teaches children to shoot, develop and print their own film. Serbest Salih, the young Syrian photographer and refugee who leads the project, frames photography as a shared language — something the children take up first as play, then as a way of reading the world around them. MACK published the book in 2021: 160 pages, paperback, with texts in English, Arabic and Turkish.

Mardin and the Mesopotamian plain beyond it form the backdrop. What the pictures mostly hold is games and discovery — friends caught mid-jump, upside down, leaning out of windows, in improvised costume. War arrives only at the edges of the frame: a fighter plane crossing an otherwise clear sky, a child peering out from a UNHCR carton. The refusal to dwell on suffering reads as method rather than avoidance. These children are examining their own surroundings with curiosity, and the camera is what makes that examination possible.

The book credits the project’s young participants, collectively and without names. Neither Sirkhane nor Salih is put forward as the photographer, and no individual child is identified on the pages. That flatness of attribution is unusual in a field organised around singular authorship, and it governs how the book is read: as work made in common, held together by the darkroom rather than by one pair of eyes.

For a collector, the case for the book rests less on scarcity than on position. It is a MACK paperback at a modest 14.5 by 21 centimetres, priced within reach and, with proceeds going to the Her Yerde Sanat–Sirkhane non-profit, deliberately so. It belongs on the small shelf of photobooks that treat the workshop itself as the work — where the question is not who took the picture but what taking it opened up.